ST AMPU AS YOU GO --- - ............-- .. -----: ::'" -' .... - - ..- ::'- .. - ... -.;;.-,.. .. ' - - -- , ............. - ... .;;-.... ..,.- --... .,"'"'" - """- -"-"'^""" - I T was early summer, and Tama San and I had just started off together from T okio to make a little tour of Hokkaido, one of the northern islands of Japan. Bee, the English friend with whom I kept house in Tokio, was away on a visit, so I had decided to take T ama, our Japanese housekeeper, as my com- panion on the trip. W e travelled third class, which is always crowded, and Tama had been so concerned about her costume and her innumerable red wick- er bags and bundles that we had bare- ly made the train and so couldn't find places together. However, she was now seated across the aisle facing me, so I could watch her, and I must say that her behavIor baffled me. She had begun at once to playa kind of game with a smal1 black book and a furoshiki. Furoshi- ,hi are the bright-colored handkerchiefs which the Japanese use for handbags. Tama had a half-dozen with her, one of which she kept in her lap, and she occupied herself by untying it, taking out the black book, retying it, studying the book for a time, untying, putting the book away, retying. .,A.t intervals of per- haps five minutes she would do the whole thing over. Sometimes she would vary the game by trotting down the aisle to, question the conductor, waving the book excitedly. At the stations she would jump off, book in hand, and disappear in the crowd. Since the knots in the furoshiki had to be just so, I could un- derstand that this game solved the prob- lem of how to make the time pass, but what was in the black book? \Ve were too far apart for me to ask questions, and I was hemmed in by numerous tour- ing Japanese, so I stood it for five hours. Finally, however, my curiosity was too much for me, and when she got off at the next station I followed her. Tama clattered down the platform in the wake of a group of students who fi- nally brought up at the out- skirts of a large crowd of peo- ple. Peering over the heads of the crowd, I saw that they were gathered around a small shelf on a wall of the waiting room. On the shelf were chained a pad of green ink and a wooden-handled rubber stamp, with which everyone in turn was making an impression in a book like T am a' s. Tama suddenly saw me and beamed. HStampu," she explained, waving to- ward the shelf. \Vhen her turn came, she printed a design in green on a blank page of her book. "N aisu stampu," she . said in her best Japanese-English, and handed it over for my admiration. I studied the "nice stamp." Inside a circle an inch and a half in diameter, a jade-green train dashed out of a jade- green forest, belching clouds of green- bordered smoke against a background of mountains, over which arched a rain- bow studded with five-petalled flowers. At one side, in Japanese characters, was what I assumed to be the name of the station. "Kirei desu" ("how pretty"), I murmured, feeling that this was too Japanese an occasion for comment in English. (My Japanese was even weak- er than Tama's English, and it was our custom to communicate in an approxi- mation of whichever language seemed momentarily the more appropriate.) An around us, Tama's fellow stampu-collectors were admiring the new item and enthusiastically talking over their stamp books. They were a mixed crowd. A businessman in plus fours and a Western coat, his pockets bulging with foun taIn pens, exchanged books with an elderly farmer in skin- tight, long trousers. Numerous univer- sity students, recognizable by their uni- forms and rhomboid-shaped caps, debat- ed furiously, probably over the inner meaning of the design. It was like a club. The session was broken off abruptly by a blast of the train dispatcher's whistle. \Ve all scattered, the businessman and a number of elegant elderly couples to the first- and second-class carriages, most of us to the third. S OME of Tama's neighbors on the train had left, so I moved over beside her and we iooked through her book together. It was almost full of de- signs in black, blue, orange, purple, or green ink, and I saw at once that most of them hadn't been gathered on this trip, or for that mat- ter at railway stations. T ama pointed to a picture of a fan- tastic dramatic hero. "Kab- uki," she said) meaning that the stalnp had come from the KabukI Theatre. She giggled over a picture of a little girl in a bathing suit waving toward Mt. Fuji, under which a legend in Eng- lish advertised a hotel at a popular sum- mer resort. Tama's favorite stampu dis- played an elegan t lady with a parasol and was a memento from a department store. 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